Making machines that can listen

MIT Professor Paris Smaragdis seeks to build machines that can hear and understand sound better than humans, with potential uses such as locating traffic accidents by sound or predicting industrial drill failures. His research group works on machine learning for sound source separation, smart devices that augment audio surroundings, and tools for understanding, manipulating, analyzing, and creating music. His earlier work included neural-network-based sound separation used to clean up archival recordings for the 2021 documentary series "The Beatles: Get Back."